djhworld

However, I bought my Apple TV in 2022-2023 when it was like £129, so excellent value for money, not so sure nowadays.

The reason why I keep it connected to the network (with a traffic rule) is I use home assistant to run automations etc so need at least LAN connectivity.

Great little device, I think I paid £130 for it a few years ago.

There is no reason for me to upgrade to this device, but that £299 price tag really stinks, there is no way I'd buy it at that price if I didn't have the older model already.

The "Jev calls" counter only seems to increment at junction points like battles, conversation prompts, menus etc.

Is something else moving the character around?

Obviously streaming was the big selling point, something that iTunes didn’t offer at the time, but I swear the client was written in some native UI framework, along with the C/C++ library.

Or was the spotify UI always just a browser engine skin and the perception of speed was from the playback engine?

Anyway, cool to see projects like this

I think this is awesome though, feels like a lot of things on OS's could just be represented by databases - where does it end?

So if you want to follow the lack mods on the web, especially ones written in the 2010s, you need to make sure you strengthen the legs to accommodate the hardware

Definitely impressive demo, I do wonder though if the countless artwork, films, images etc produced over many decades around Lord of the Rings somewhat influenced the outcome of this though.

I really struggle with visualising what things are going to look like. Even trivial stuff like choosing a colour to paint the wall. Sticking tiny paint swatches or painting sections from sample pots just doesn't work either, it's either all or nothing to me. I don't have that aphantasia thing either, quite a vivid imagination actually, but for stuff like home decor and I'm useless

I'm not really in the market for a vision pro or VR headset so my version of this is to take a picture of a space (say a wall) and feed it into on of the AI image generators with a colour - probably taken from a screenshot of a paint vendor, and tell it to generate me an image of what the wall would look like in <this colour>.

Obviously it's not perfect but it's definitely given me a better idea of what, in the ballpark, something would look like when painted on the whole wall.

I've also had some success with getting it to generate stuff with wall decor on as well, even pasting in product images (e.g. "what would this mirror look like") - even on the "painted" wall.

Again, not perfect, but it's helped me a lot.

e.g. mymcpserver.com/tools/call?mcp-method=search

Sort of feels like those videos you see of high tech warehouses where the human workers really only operate on the outskirts of the building, and everything central is completely automated (picking, sorting, storing, inventory etc)

Unless they tell you to switch the alarm system off I guess.

I feel they kind of did in the Xbox 360 era. Maybe it was just down to luck because Sony dropped the ball in the early years of the PS3 and Microsoft got the jump on them a bit.

The 360 was amazing looking back on it, Xbox Live, trying out innovative ideas like 1vs100, attracting lots of publishers to the platform for games, Xbox Summer of Arcade.

I was a big OG Xbox fan but even then I knew deep down it was never going to catch up to Sony with the PS2. Then the 360 came out and it was brilliant.

Sadly they threw it all away with the Xbox One and while recovered some credibility somewhat with the Series X, it's definitely not the same as those golden years of the 360.

Maybe the 360 was an aberration in Microsoft's history and the years since then have just been a regression

I know there's a strong desire for physical media, but games are not the same as movies or music and haven't been for a long time.

nowadays the price of these 2nd hand mini PCs has shot up, and even if you do get a chance to get one, upgrading it with more RAM is gonna be painful

I've been on the tariff for 2 years now, at first I was looking at the prices every day, but over time you get used to how it works and the price watching starts to tail off. The rule of thumb is just to avoid high load stuff during the peak window (load shift) - sticking to those principles you generally come out of on top. Playing the averages is the key.

Nowadays I don't really look at the prices that much other than when it's windy as I might be tempted to charge the car.

That being said though, if current world events continue and the energy situation degrades further - causing my average unit rate to start creeping up, I might consider getting a home battery , solar etc to compensate, or leave the tariff entirely.

I can see it being a nice feature for higher-load tasks though, e.g. my dishwasher uses about 1.8kWh for a cycle. On this tariff it's trivial to compute the best start-end time based on the 30 minute price windows, so if the dishwasher could do that it would be pretty sweet. Right now my dishwasher just supports a 3h delay function. I wouldn't mind if my dishwasher had a (local) API you could hit to control its schedule. Sadly this usually comes with some cloud requirement though.

You can do this yourself as well with home assistant (if your charger supports it) and some API calls. It's just a matter of telling the charger when to start and stop the charge. The rest of the communication between the charger and the car is some protocol I can't remember the name of.

I don't sit in the dark during the peak times, during the week I'm working during that time anyway and I still have my monitors etc on. It's just I don't usage high-draw appliances like cookers during that time. I eat dinner after 7pm anyway.

Also I have an EV, but don't commute or travel long distances regularly, so I charge my car when opportunity strikes, especially when the prices go negative - this means I don't really spend that much on fuel really. The savings really start to come in if you have "bursty" high energy stuff that can take advantage of the cheapest periods like an EV or home battery. If you just have "baseload" stuff that runs all day like A/C or whatever then yeah you won't really see any significant savings.

For me I'm happy to avoid big power draws during the peak times, as I'm 'compensated' for it outside of those periods with a little planning. Downside is when the wind is not blowing AND disruptions to global energy markets - I'm exposed to that, warts and all, there's definitely been an increase in prices over the past 4 weeks, although there has been a few days (including today) where the wind has basically made the energy free and my average unit rate is dropping again.

Fixed price advantage is you use power whenever you want. Your average unit rate is just the price on the tariff. Predictable and safe.

Agile price changes every 30 minutes, so you need to do a little planning. But if you take advantage of the cheap periods you'll generally come out on top. My average unit rate last year was like 16.5p p/kWh whereas the standard tariff was 23-24p, so some nice savings. There's also some risk involved - the price can go up to £1 p/kWh and a few days in winter in 2024 it did that for a short while (around the peak periods) so you have to take on that risk - and obviously being exposed to the world energy markets does mean you get exposure to stuff like wars impacting global markets.

I mean there's nothing stopping you from using lots of power between 4pm-7pm it's just you'll drag that average unit rate up to the point where it's probably not worth it. When I say "use lots of power" I don't mean like I sit in the dark between 4-7pm, it's just I avoid the big ticket power users like ovens, showers, cookers etc

I'm not sure what the solution is, I know that the price of electricty is dictated by gas so maybe decoupling that will help - but that probably has complications with balancing the grid.

The tariff I'm on (Octopus Agile) suits me as I WFH, have an EV and it's just me living in the house, I can move my usage outside of hte peak periods quite easily and I built a website to help me find the cheapest charging periods for my car based on the prices for the next day. The other day my average unit rate was like 2p per/kWh and I dumped like 30kWh into my car lol

Generally the prices betwen 4pm-7pm are expensive and the rest of the time it's cheaper - although with current world events things have gotten a little spicy lately.

On really windy days you definitely get to see the benefit where prices drop to zero or even negative, which is great if you have an EV or something to dump lots of power into. Looking at todays prices they're like 1-3p p/kWh!

But that doesn't last, as the wind dies things start to get back to normal.

The key with the tariff though is to just play the averages and generally avoid high power usage during the peak periods. My average for the last 2 years was around 30% cheaper (p/year) than what I would have paid if I was on a normal energy tariff.

It will be interesting to see whether that trend continues, especially with the state the world has suddenly been thrown into.

My parents for example sweat the small stuff and go around the house turning LED driven lights off to "save electricity" even though it would barely make a dent in their bill.

Granted, they come from a time of incadescants burning 60-100w at a time so I can see why that habit might be deeply ingrained.

I think this is true in the sense of there's no regulation it's just up to the developer, but my house (new build, 2021) has an RJ45 patch panel downstairs with 4 ports that lead to 4 areas of the house.

This was actually a surprise to me when I got the place because when I was speaking to the sales associates they had 0 clue what I was talking about when I enquired about network cabling. If I had known they were installing it as standard I'd have asked for more ports in more rooms, but hindsight...

But yeah, there's also 4 phone sockets as well, which I don't use. This solution might be interesting to try out, but phone sockets are in the same place as where the ethernet sockets are and I've no real need to expand in those rooms right now.

Where did you learn all the PCB design stuff to make your circuit boards that controlled the filaments?

It looks like nowadays the handbook says just go from stage 3, which makes sense - compiling everything was kinda stupid :D

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20041013055338/http://www.gentoo...

Hitching their wagon to the AI train comes with different expectations, leading to a mixed bag of reviews like this.

just a personal blog really